Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

351–360 of 372 posts

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#351

Post by majewsky »

user5994461 wrote: post #249
WA wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Insightful post, thank you. I feel like Wikipedia is the only really high-traffic non-profit, but they're doing something that requires a lot less engineering (ie. most of the page can be easily cached and is the same for all users vs. Twitter). WhatsApp comes to mind as an example of complex engineering (storing and delivering messages for millions) and they pulled it off with a small team at first. And more: once t…

WhatsApp is a simple, single purpose app. It's not a complex engineering problem at all. Maybe it could be if it were done in the year 2000. It is not nowadays. [Granted, there is still work to be done to make a decent product, they had great people and they executed very well.]

And isn't Twitter a simple, single-purpose app, too? (At least before they purchased Vine and Periscope.)

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#352

Post by [deleted] »

drakonandor wrote: post #322
nikcub wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly what many on Wall St have been telling them to do for years. Despite the popular perception of investment bankers, they do value "patio11 style businesses" more highly than the Twitter style of spending and losing billions of dollars and not going anywhere. I actually don't think anybody values the later.

Their revenue almost doubled from 2014 to 2015, and is on track to be a bit higher than 2015. It's silly to pretend they're just burning money for fun.

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#353

Post by [deleted] »

nl wrote: post #259
meowface wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source on that rationale for Salesforce backing out?

It's been pretty widely reported. This is a good summary: Twitter's reputation as a haven for trolls was one of the key reasons both Disney and Salesforce declined to make bids for Twitter, according to reports from Bloomberg and CNBC host Jim Cramer.... the family-friendly animation giant had even hired two investment banks to work out a bid for the service, but eventually decided not to put a deal on the table, fea…

[deleted]

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#354

Post by mason240 »

drspacemonkey wrote: post #348
mason240 wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! It's History-Podcasts.com. I am a couple of months behind in putting in new shows, but there are over 200 there now.

I don't know if you're taking show suggestions, but I'd like to recommend The Dollop. The Dollop is a bi-weekly* American History Podcast. Every week, Dave Anthony reads a story to his friend, Gareth Reynolds, who has no idea what the topic is going to be about. It's hysterical, and has a huge following. They do live shows and everything. Just finished up a tour of Australia. *(bi-weekly means whatever Dave wants it…

Hey, thanks! I was not aware of that show.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#356

Post by __derek__ »

artursapek wrote: post #6

I've always sort of had this question that continues to feel naive - but I'm not sure I know the answer: why do so many companies feel like they have to grow perpetually? Why can't Twitter just be happy being Twitter, knowing its limits and making a stable profit? Instead it's more users, more VC money, more staff... constantly burning as quickly as possible. There's a ceiling on every business; it's all bound to com…

Related to your point about your ideal sort of business, I enjoyed reading Rand Fishkin's reflections on his experience with Moz. On raising money[1]:

> As a result, the behavior VCs generally need to encourage is growth at any cost. If a company burns out trying to become that 100X star in the portfolio, it’s OK. But if they choose to grow slow and steady and build a sustainable but not particularly dominant business over 10–15 years, that’s non-ideal for the portfolio or the fund’s returns.

[1]: https://medium.com/@randfish/what-id-change-keep-the-same-do...

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#357

Post by dvirsky »

ricksplat wrote: post #173

I'm just back from a holiday in south east Asia. All the time I was there I was getting ads on twitter targetted to the local market (in the local language) presumably based on my roaming IP. Maybe my grasp is a bit simplistic but isn't this just intensely stupid? My twitter profile is explicitly Western European is twitter's location based advertising really just as dumb as matching IP addresses to regions? If I wer…

it's a very low percentage of users all in all, doesn't really matter especially if you're charging by clicks and not impressions.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#358

Post by draw_down »

user5994461 wrote: post #261

3800 employees, $2700M spent a year. That's 700k per employee. IT'S FREAKING INSANE! There are only 4 tech companies in the world who ever made more than $700k in revenue per head, in any recent years: SoftBank, Microsoft, Google, Apple http://uk.businessinsider.com/top-tech-companies-revenue-per...

Somehow I find myself unable to get riled up about employee compensation being too high.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#359

Post by flukus »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #124
mason240 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've spent about $100 trying to promote my history podcast curation site on Twitter, and only got about 5 hits.

Have you considered running Reddit ads on history-centric subreddits?

I really wish reddit had a "show me previous ads" feature. A lot of they ads are stuff I'm interested in, but I don't notice them until I'm moving away from the page.

Re: Twitter Plans Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week

#360

Post by brianwawok »

VLM wrote: post #338
quxbar wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to point out that this last point is totally ridiculous. Twitter is functionally just like like Xanga or Livejournal or any other dead blogging platform you care to name. Just because you have a community of dedicated users and a better UI doesn't mean the service is unique. It's as if you thought Evian(R) or Dasani(TM) are public utilities. Frankly, I think we're going to see a backlash against information ov…

"than the producers want to provide" Yes this is the analogy to TV where the market provided precisely 3 channels (plus PBS) for decades and a third of the population reliably watched each show on each channel, but that was 1970 and now in 2010s there's 500 cable channels and a wildly success narrowcast might reach as many as 1 in 40 citizens. Usually far less, of course, as little reach as 1 in 300 is possible with…

Not sure tv analogy plays out.

We have many shows because people want different stuff to watch sure.

Why couldn't Reddit be the only BBS of the internet? Everyone in the same website, but live in a unique subreddit.

TV doesn't work like that.

Post reply on HN